Saturday, January 26, 2008

It would be a cliché to call Peggy Noonan a concern troll

Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.

There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."

That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.

But "concern troll" seems too shopworn a term to do justice to Noonan's sanctimonious hectoring of the Clintons. Leave it to Digby to nail it. She calls Noonan a Pecksniffian Twit. That pretty much says it all. She's also good on why people should lighten up and not get so worked up about the Democrats saying nasty thing about each other in the primaries.